‘It is nothing, nothing,’ I said desperately. ‘Is he a local man then?’

‘I think he was born and bred near Wideacre,’ said the man, impatient with my questions and worried at the way my hands were trembling and how my eyes had gone dark. ‘What shall I tell him?’

‘Tell him that the old mill is washed away and that everything is different,’ I burst out, my voice rising with my fear. ‘Tell him there is no place for him on Wideacre. Tell him to find another store, another route. Tell him he may not come near me or near my land. Tell him my people will not allow it. Tell him he was always an outcast and I was always loved.’

My knees were buckling but suddenly I found John’s haul arm around my waist. He held me up and one hard look from him sent the man scuffling down the shingle to slip between the upturned fishing boats.

John MacAndrew, professional that he was, scooped me up like a baby and tossed me up into the curricle without a word. From under the driver’s seat he produced a flask of his Scottish whisky and held the silver bottle to my lips. I turned my head away in disgust at the smell but he forced a couple of mouthfuls on me and I found that it warmed me and stopped my panic-stricken trembling. We sat in silence until I could hear the frightened beats of my heart slowing again. My mind was blank with fear at this sudden apparition — this ghost on a clear day. There were surely a hundred better things I could have done than to break down, and that in front of a man who was led, no doubt, by one of our expelled poachers, or one of Acre’s ne’er-do-wells, or by one of the farm labourers pressed into the navy and run off to the smugglers. The black horse alone meant nothing. I was a fool to panic. A fool to be afraid.

But even now, sitting up high in the curricle in the warm afternoon sunshine with hundreds of pounds’ worth of MacAndrew silver in the boot, and hundreds of guineas of bloodstock between the shafts, I felt utterly vulnerable and abasingly afraid.

I shuddered in one convulsive shiver, then took a deep breath. I gave the inside of my cheeks a good hard bite and, hidden in my lap, I pinched the palms of my hands with my sharp strong fingernails. Then I turned to John MacAndrew and smiled.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I am silly to have been upset by him. He was a free-trader, a smuggler, and he wanted somewhere to store his kegs. When I said no he was abusive. I don’t know why I should let it upset me, but somehow it did.’

John MacAndrew nodded understandingly, but bis eyes were sharp.

‘Why did you say no?’ he asked. ‘You’re surely not against them?’

‘I never was,’ I said slowly. But then my fear rose up and choked the truth out of me. ‘But I’ll have no lawless men on Wideacre,’ I cried passionately. ‘I’ll have no leaders of mobs, no attackers of property, no men who move and work in the night on my land, near my home. He may be a smuggler today, but who knows what he might do tomorrow? I’ll have no trained men led by a black horse riding the lanes near my house.’ I stopped with a sob, horrified at my outburst. I was too scared and shocked at myself either to retract or to try to reduce the impression I had so clearly given of fright and horror.

John’s warm hand covered mine.

‘Do you want to tell me why?’ he asked, and his voice was sympathetic and tender and low.

I exhaled, and it was almost a moan.

‘No,’ I said miserably. ‘No.’

We sat in silence then, the horses with their heads bowed and the reins slack, the late afternoon sun red among rosy, fleecy clouds, low over the sea.

‘I’ll drive you home then,’ said John and there was warmth and patience in his voice. I knew then that he loved me. That he loved me so much he was prepared to take on trust the things that I did, that should have warned him I was not the straightforward pretty girl I seemed. He could have guessed I had a secret, a hanging secret. But he chose instead to click to the horses and to drive me home in the sunset, which turned to twilight as we crested the downs at Goodwood and then to starlight along the sweet-smelling nighttime lanes of my land. We followed a new moon home, a slim sickle in the night sky, and when John MacAndrew lifted me down from the curricle I felt the ghost of a kiss on the top of my head.


He never pressed me for an explanation. Not through the final hot days of summer when the hay was stacked and the corn winnowed and the beasts weaned and growing fat, and there was less work on the land and more time for visiting and dancing and picnics.

When we went to Havering with Celia and Harry and Mama, John and I would find ourselves walking alone together in the ramshackle formal gardens, or in the overgrown shrubbery. When we went in to tea there would be a smile between Mama and Lady Havering, instantly wiped off their faces when John or I looked directly at either of them. If in the evening we rolled back the rugs and Mama played country dances and jigs on the Haverings’ grand piano, I would always dance the first and the last dance of the evening with my hands in John’s. Then, when we waited for our carriages in the night air, which turned cooler at the end of every sweet insignificant evening, he would tuck my wrap around my shoulders, and sometimes gather it around my neck, to brush the side of my cheek, pale and soft as a flower in the moonlight.

Then the carriages would clatter around from the stable yard and he would hand me into the chaise with a gentle pressure on my fingers to say a private goodnight among the general farewells. I would lean my head back against the silk cushions and feel the warmth of his smile, the gleam of his eyes, the touch of his hand on my cheek as the horses trotted home, and Mama sat beside me, her face smiling and at peace too.

But I was never so absorbed in this delightful, this easy, courtship that I forgot to hold on to Harry, to hold to the land. At least once a week I would climb the stairs to the room at the top of the house and take Harry into a shivering, private maze of pleasure and fear. The more often I did it, the less it meant to me, until my icy disdain of Harry’s plump pantings was real.

I knew now what my earlier passion for Harry had hidden from me. That although I had thought I had bedded him as a free woman I was as bound as if I were a slave. For it was not a free choice. I had wanted him because he was the Squire, not for himself. And now he was losing his fine, clear looks and becoming fatter and softer, I bedded the Squire, not Harry. And it was no free choice because I could not choose to say no. My safety and security on the land meant I had to keep my special, costly hold on its owner. I paid him rent as surely as the tenants who came to my round rent table with their coins tied up in a scrap of cloth. When I lay on my back, or strode round the rooms threatening him with every imaginable, ridiculous pain, I was paying my dues. And the knowledge galled me.

But although Harry had lost his magic, the land had not. Wideacre that autumn glowed like a scarlet leaf of rowan. The summer heat lingered late and even in October John could take me driving with only a shawl around my shoulders. But when the frosts came in November I was glad, for the hard ground held the scent and in the hoar frost I could see the prints of foxes’ paws and the hunting season was open. I was back in the saddle for the first time after two long years of mourning and absence, and our hounds were mastered once more by Wideacre’s Squire, as they should be. Every day Harry and I checked them and talked of nothing but foxes and hunters and runs. It was Harry’s first season and he threatened to botch it badly. But his interest in breeding good animals meant that we had the fastest hounds in the county — you had to follow them at a gallop and jump whatever lay in your path — no time for niceties! So there would always be riders who would want to come out with us and lend a hand with the hounds. Shaw was a good keeper who knew the ways of foxes, and I was always at Harry’s side.

Between Shaw the keeper, and me, Harry made a reasonable fist of it, and our first day out in October was a long glorious run that started on the common and then chased in a great sweep over the fields back to the common and a kill on the edge of the park where the Wideacre woods are encroaching on the heather and bracken. He was an old dog fox that one. I swear I hunted him one season before with Papa. He got away then from the slower old-fashioned pack but now he was three years older and Papa was dead, and even unskilled Harry, who totally lacks a hunter’s instinct, could see that the wily animal was heading for a stream to lose the scent in the water.

‘Send them in, Harry!’ I yelled above the clamour of the pack and the thunder of hoofs, the wind whipping my words away.

The horn blasted, ‘Too-roo! Too-roo!’ and the horses leaped forward; the hounds spread out with their final full-cry killing run, and the old fox strained to a final burst of speed. He nearly made it too, but they had him at the side of the stream, and Harry waded thigh-deep among squealing, hungry hounds to cut the brush and pass it, still bloody, up to me. I nodded my thanks, and took the prize in my gloved hand. I have had the first kill of the season every hunt since I was eleven when Papa smeared my face with the disgusting, rank, sticky blood.

Mama had gasped then, when she saw me, as stained as any savage, and she had neared open complaint when Papa sternly told her that I was not to be washed.

‘The child smells of fox,’ Mama said. Her voice, tremulous with anger, had dropped to a whisper.

‘It is the tradition,’ Papa said firmly. That was enough for him and it was enough for me too. God knows I was not a squeamish little doll, but when he had rubbed the blood on my face from the base of the hot tail I had swayed in my saddle with sickly faintness. But I did not fall. And I did not wash.

I solved the problem in a way that, looking back, seems typical of my desire to please my papa and yet be true to myself. Papa had told me that the tradition was that the beastly blood stayed on until it wore off. I thought for some hours while the blood congealed into crusty scabs on my young skin, then I made my way down to the old sandstone drinking trough by the stables. I sat beside it, put my face to it, and rubbed the delicate skin of my cheeks and forehead against its rough sides until I was sore and scraped, but clean.

‘Did you wash, Beatrice?’ Papa asked me sternly when we met at breakfast the following day.

‘No, Papa, I wore it away,’ I said. ‘May I start to wash again now?’

His great lovable, loving shout of laughter rattled the sash windows and the silver coffee pots.

‘Wore it away, did you, my little darling!’ he roared, and then subsided into chuckles, wiping his eyes on his napkin. ‘Yes, yes, you may wash now. You have satisfied tradition; and that’s good. And you have got your own way too, and that’s comical.’

I seemed years away from this scene and from my papa’s love as I sat in the hard winter sunshine and accepted the brush from Harry. The smell of the warm freshly killed fox had brought it all flooding back to me, but it was all long gone. Long lost, and long past.

‘A good run, Miss Lacey,’ said one of the Havering boys, Celia’s step-brother George.

‘Yes, indeed,’ I said smiling.

‘And how you do ride!’ he said with worship in his eyes. ‘I can’t keep up with you! When you took that last hedge I had to shut my eyes. I was certain that low bough would sweep you off!’

I laughed at the recollection.

‘I had my eyes shut too!’ I confessed. ‘I get so excited I forget to take care. I put Tobermory at the hedge without even seeing the tree. When I realized there was no room for us between the hedge and the low branches it was too late to do anything about it except keep my head down and hope we squeezed through. We just did, though I felt the twigs scratch my back.’

‘I hear you have been racing too,’ said George, nodding to John MacAndrew, who rode up to us. The sun seemed to shine with sudden new warmth, and we smiled into each other’s eyes.

‘Just a friendly race,’ I said. ‘But Dr MacAndrew rides for high stakes.’

George’s bright eyes flicked from one to another of us.

‘I hope you did not lose Tobermory!’ he said.

‘No,’ I said, with a private smile to John MacAndrew. ‘But I’ll not be betting blind against the doctor again.’

George laughed, and at last took himself off to compliment Harry on the run, and I was left alone with John. But it was the trained doctor, not the lover who spoke.